Edward Bond, Playwright Who Clashed With Royal Censors, Dies at 89

No modern British dramatist polarized his countrymen as much as Edward Bond, who died on Sunday at age 89.

To some, he was an unholy terror, relentless in his doctrinaire socialism and disconcertingly fond of violent theatrical effects. To others, he was almost a secular saint, a writer of unflinching integrity in a world of compromise and so sensitive to human frustration that he invariably peopled his plays with characters suffering, often graphically, from extreme forms of oppression and exploitation.

But both parties would agree that his first important play, “Saved,” precipitated the end of theatrical censorship in Britain.

In 1965, the Royal Court Theater submitted “Saved,” a graphic portrait of mostly young and sometimes violent no-hopers adrift in London’s lower depths, to the Lord Chamberlain, who had held absolute power over British drama since 1737. The response by a functionary was widely thought of as absurdly anachronistic: A scene in which hooligans stone to death a baby in a pram could not be publicly staged.

Mr. Bond refused to alter a line, and the Royal Court supported him by temporarily becoming a private club, and thus, as the law then stood, no longer needing the Lord Chamberlain’s sanction.

This was a tactic that had been used in London before, notably for Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1956 and Arthur Miller’s “View from a Bridge” in 1958, both of which hinted at the then-taboo subject of homosexuality.